b. Indians in the United States:  Suketu Mehta, “A Passage from India” (2005)
c. Americans in India:  Saritha Rai, “M.B.A. Students Bypassing Wall Street for a Summer in India” (2005)
d. Americans in India:  Somini Sengupta, “In a Twist, Americans Appear in Ranks of Indian Firms” (2006)

Last week the IDS reported that 49 Indiana University undergraduates in the Kelley School of Business have gone on a week-long field trip to India, enough time to get a taste of a place where some of them might end up pursuing careers or doing business with.  Not enough time, however, to learn a language or very much beyond the surface of a culture and society and economy.  Even so, it is an important beginning of a process.

The New Yorker article is about an American company, Office Tiger, doing business in Chennai, the fourth-largest city in India.  I myself disagreed with certain aspects of the article, but I still learned a lot from it, and it reminded me of many of the themes of our H105 course.  I don’t know what you associate with “outsourcing,” but Office Tiger is not doing low-skilled work.  It is not a sweatshop; it is not marred by the human rights violations so routine and so pervasive in the “global economy” (yet so shamefully ignored by American media).  Instead, Office Tiger is furtively doing highly skilled white-collar work for major American corporations at one-tenth an American salary.  It represents the confluence of two sets of yearnings:  American corporate yearning for cheap labor, and Indian yearning for upward social mobility in a place where per capita income is $1.20 per day.  (Ponder that number for a little while.)

In the article, you’ll meet two thirty-something Princeton graduates who run Office Tiger.  (#1) Why, in college, did these two young men eat applesauce in their dorm rooms so they could spend an extra hour working on a medieval history paper, when they were destined to go to Harvard Business School and then Wall Street?  Why did excelling in medieval history matter so much to them?

(#2) To what degree are these two American executives committed to the community of Chennai?  What is the relationship between their ideological faith in the “free market” and “meritocracy,” and real conditions in the city of Chennai?  In other words, who are the winners of the so-called "free market"?  Who are the losers?

More interestingly, you’ll also meet twenty-something Harish Kumar, who after a record of failure stopped school at age 16, but who is now an instructor at Office Tiger imparting technical and cultural knowledge to employees during their six-month probationary periods.  Mr. Kumar is half-Benjamin Franklin, half-Harriet Robinson, gone global.

(#3) What does Mr. Kumar’s typical workday look like?  How does he spend his spare time?  How does he enjoy his relatively high income?  (Notice, too, what Mr. Kumar jealously imagines takes place in American college dormitories!)

(#4) As you will read, Office Tiger employees in India are working extremely assiduously to gain exposure to the broader world beyond their home city, and to the white-collar end of the global economy.  Meanwhile, how are you working (assiduously?) to gain exposure to the broader world and to the global economy, so that you might be able to compete with the ever increasing number of Harish Kumars in the world?

(#5) What is the other, more hidden, and more disquieting meaning of “exposure” in Mr. Kumar’s world, as discussed in the article?  What potential economic shift is he becoming vulnerable to?  (Indeed, what are you yourself vulnerable to?  Please wake up, before it’s too late.)

The other three articles by Mehta, Rai, and Sengupta also concern the booming economy of India.  Mehta confronts the resentment that some Americans express toward outsourcing, and toward Indian-Americans.  Rai and Sengupta examine a new trend of American college students and graduates seeking internships and jobs in India.

(#6) What does Mehta think about academic standards in American schools compared to Indian schools?  Why (in the other two articles) are more and more Americans seeking internships and jobs in India, rather than the United States?

(A paradox you don't have to write about, but worth thinking about:  Where is the "modern" and the "global" located in the modern global world?)

You will be evaluated on your close attention to the contents of the articles in your responses to each of the questions.  Those responses will vary in length.  There are obviously no right or wrong answers.  Thus the key factor is close attention.

Thorough papers with short quotes will receive full extra credit -- one notch up in their final grade for the course (e.g., from B to B+).  Less than thorough papers (with vague platitudes and/or long quotes) will receive NO extra credit.  Please don't waste your time or our time.